Can a Blind Person Be a Racist? [Excerpt]
By Osagie Obasogie,
Scientific American
| 01. 10. 2014
Adapted from Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind, by Osagie K. Obasogie. Published by Stanford University Press © 2013 Osagie K. Obasogie. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. All Rights Reserved.
Do blind people understand race? Given the vast and sprawling writings on race over the past several decades, it is surprising that scholars have not explored this question in any real depth. Race has played a profound and central role to human relationships. Yet how is it possible that this basic question has escaped deeper contemplation?
This gap in the scholarly literature and public discourse points to a fundamental assumption that we almost all make about race, its significance, and its salience. Race has been central to human relationships. Yet, there seems to be at least one thing that most people can agree upon: that race is, to a large extent, simply what is seen. There are surely many variables that inform individuals’ racial consciousness, such as religion, language, food, and culture. But race is primarily thought to be self-evidently known, in terms...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 11.24.2024
Gig work in childcare, nursing, and transportation; non-invasive prenatal testing; gene editing; and space expeditions can all be attributed to one mistaken, pervasive assumption: that “we can innovate our way out of the thorniest problems, including reproductive ones” (22). In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, feminist political theorist Jennifer Denbow demonstrates why the U.S. has put so much of its hopes, and its money, on technological “innovations”––and why that hasn’t addressed...
By Tamsin Metelerkamp, Daily Maverick | 11.18.2024
The National Health Research Ethics Council (NHREC) has confirmed that heritable human genome editing (HHGE) remains illegal in South Africa, after changes in the latest version of the South African Ethics in Health Research Guidelines sparked concern among researchers that...
By World Health Organization, World Health Organization | 11.20.2024
By Bernice Lottering, Gene Online | 11.08.2024
South Africa’s updated health-research ethics guidelines, which now include heritable human genome editing, have sparked concern among scientists. The revisions, made in May but only recently gaining attention, outline protocols for modifying genetic material in sperm, eggs, or embryos—changes that...